Ada Lovelace — widely considered the first computer programmer — famously said, “I never am really satisfied that I understand anything; because, understand it well as I may, my comprehension can only be an infinitesimal fraction of all I want to understand.” That quotation brings to mind the axiom that a curious mind is always asking more questions and learning is never complete. Every day, like Lovelace, I am all too aware that my knowledge is dwarfed by what I have yet to learn.

Around the world today, the technology community is celebrating Lovelace and the many women in technology who’ve followed in her footsteps. Here at Creative Commons, we think a lot about women in science and technology and the untapped potential we have yet to realize. In his speech to the United Nations a few weeks ago, President Obama spoke of the importance of women and girls in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). The White House identified Creative Commons as a key member of an emerging community of practice supporting girls in STEM.

A few days later, Creative Commons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium announced that we’d formed a task force to determine how open educational resources (OER) can support the success of girls and women in STEM fields. As I said in that announcement, the challenges of the future will require bright, ambitious, well-educated people of both genders.

Many people reading this probably know that the OER movement played a pivotal role in my career. When I was at the Hewlett Foundation, we made a gamble in starting our OER initiative. At that time, OER was an untested idea. Today, those early investments are paying off, with open-licensed resources benefitting women, men, boys, and girls around the world, many of whom wouldn’t otherwise have access to high-quality educational materials that can be localized and improved for teaching and learning.

But like Lovelace, we’re not yet satisfied. Last month’s groundbreaking open textbook legislation in California was a huge step in the right direction, but it was just one step. We must keep the end vision in mind: together, we can democratize education through openly licenses resources, tools and processes. While we can’t create future Ada Lovelaces in a lab, we can provide for a culture of education that rises to the challenge of its most curious learners.

Geoscience Australia recently announced that it will license all images from the Landsat 8 satellite under CC BY. (Geoscience Australia is a partner of the United States Geological Survey in the Landsat program.)

Creative Commons Australia reports:

The new Landsat 8 satellite is scheduled to be launched in early 2013, with GA’s full implementation being scheduled for May or June 2013.

Upon full implementation, which involves the deployment of major infrastructure upgrades by GA, data will be beamed from Landsat 8 on a daily basis to GA-operated ground stations in Alice Springs and Darwin. As soon as possible after receipt and processing, GA will make the satellite images publicly available free of charge.

GA will make the data available under a Creative Commons CC BY Australia 3.0 licence, which will facilitate legal reuse of the images.

GA is expecting a major upsurge in demand for the images when its free to air service is up and running. Jeff Kingwell, Section Leader of GA’s National Earth Observation Group, has indicated this prediction is based on the experience of its senior partner Geological Survey where there was a 1000 fold usage increase on commencement of its free to air service online. “Our experience is that using the Creative Commons Attribution Licence — which is the default licence for GA information — makes the data more useful and easier to apply. For example, to help the Indonesian government to monitor forest management, GA supplies Landsat data from a number of foreign data archives. Since we can apply the same licence conditions to each data source, the information is much more useful and easier to share and reuse.”

(Read the full article.)

Here at Creative Commons, we applaud governments and intergovernmental organizations licensing their information and data under CC licenses (or the CC0 public domain waiver). Australia’s partnership with the United States in the Landsat program is a perfect example of why it’s important to use a license that’s open and internationally applicable.

A few weeks ago a group of CC staffers traveled to the Open Knowledge Festival in Helsinki, Finland to meet with our friends in the open knowledge and data community. There were many welcome outcomes from this – including our European regional meeting (expect a post on this soon) – not the least of which was our second School of Open workshop.

For those who haven’t heard of it yet, the School of Open is a collaboration between Creative Commons and P2PU (Peer 2 Peer University). Its aim is to provide easily digestible educational exercises, resources, and professional development courses that help individuals and institutions learn about and employ open tools, such as the CC licenses. You can find out more at this wiki page.

During the second half of 2012, Creative Commons is holding School of Open workshops around the world, including Berlin, Palo Alto, Mexico City, London, and Jakarta. The idea behind these workshops is to bring together those interested in spreading the word about open knowledge, teach them about peer-learning and the role it can play in this, and (hopefully) start them down the track of creating their own peer-led course on open.

The Helsinki workshop, which ran on the Wednesday of the festival, was a joint project with the School of Data, a similar initiative run by P2PU and the Open Knowledge Foundation to promote data literacy and data ‘wrangling’ skills. The workshop was a great success, with a full house of more than 25 attendees, including educators, programmers, digital technologists and enthusiasts. After introductions and explanations, about 12 chose to work on projects for the School of Open, while the rest broke off to take School of Data courses.

In just four hours, this School of Open team managed to complete the “Teach someone something with open content” challenge and get a good way through the “Make a P2PU course in half an hour” mini-course. The result were outlines for several new P2PU courses, designed to teach people new skills entirely through CC-licensed and other open materials including “How to share and distribute a song”. You can find all related notes and materials from the workshop here.

Feedback from the participants in the workshop was great – everyone felt that by the end of the day they had a good understanding of the workings of the School of Open and the potential it had to provide learning resources for anyone and everyone. They also had some great feedback on ways to improve the school’s web interface, materials and structure, based on their own experiences and expertise. And they were all keen to continue to work on their courses and the School of Open.

Congratulations to all those who participated in the workshop on achieving so much in such a short amount of time. We look forward to seeing you around the School of Open discussion lists and events. For anyone else who wants to get involved, the best way to start is to join the discussion list and/or sign up for announcements. You can also email the Project Manager directly.

Creative Commons communities in the Arab world are planning to host the fourth CC Arab regional meeting #4 in Cairo (Egypt) from December 11 to 15, in cooperation with the Arab Digital Expression Foundation (ADEF).

This has been an exciting year from the CC Arab regional communities, with more and more countries joining our collaborative projects, meet-ups, and local and regional gatherings like the CC Iftar.

The fourth regional meeting will be an opportunity to gather CC Arab world communities and have people working together on collaborative projects, workshops, and peer-produced ideas.

Following a formula adopted last year in Tunis, we will be hosting a set of workshops that are designed and produced by the regional community itself. In order to have better teamwork, workshops can accommodate only a limited amount of participants.

If you speak Arabic and you are based in the Arab region, and if you have an interest in openness, sharing culture and cooperation, please have a look at the call for proposals.

We are looking forward to hearing from you!

A meeting of the Creative Commons Board of Directors was held on 22-23 September 2012 at MIT in Cambridge, MA hosted by Media Lab Director (and CC Chairman) Joi Ito.

The Directors received an update on 4.0 license revisions and a report from the Audit Committee on the FY 2011 audit. A budget for 2013 was presented, as were fundraising projections through 2014. The Board passed a resolution honoring former CC VP Mike Linksvayer for his outstanding contributions to the organization.

The Directors considered how CC could best implement its mission in the future and reviewed a strategic plan. Project proposals in the areas of educational publishing, policy organizations, open licensing courseware and big data were also discussed. The Board expressed its desire to incorporate technical innovation as the bedrock of all program activities and to focus more resources on development of innovative technical capabilities that would encourage the use of CC licenses in today’s platforms and digital devices. Additional appointments to the Board were also proposed.